Kevin Warsh — President Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve — sat down in front of the Senate Banking Committee on Monday and proceeded to make Elizabeth Warren look like she wandered into the wrong hearing room.
Adorable. (Warren’s word, not ours. But we’re keeping it.)
Warren came in hot. She kicked off the hearing with what can only be described as a rehearsed tirade, calling Warsh a “sock puppet” for President Trump and accusing the President of trying to seize control of the Fed to juice the economy before the midterms. She had her talking points laminated and ready to go.
There was just one problem: Warsh didn’t cooperate.
When Senator John Kennedy asked him point-blank — “Are you going to be the president’s human sock puppet?” — Warsh didn’t flinch. “I’ll be an independent actor if confirmed as chairman of the Federal Reserve.” Calm. Confident. The kind of answer that makes Warren’s whole line of attack collapse like a folding table at a campaign rally.
But the real fun came when Warren tried her signature move: the gotcha question. She demanded Warsh “name one aspect of Trump’s economic agenda you disagree with.” This is Warren’s bread and butter — force a Trump nominee into either criticizing the President (which gives her a headline) or refusing to answer (which gives her a different headline).
Warsh saw it coming from a mile away. Instead of walking into the trap, he pivoted with a self-deprecating joke about Trump saying he was “out of central casting” and quipped that he’d “look older, greyer and show up with a cigar of sorts.” The chamber actually applauded.
Warren’s response? “Quite adorable.”
That’s Washington code for “I just got outmaneuvered and I’m pretending I don’t care.”
Then she tried the money angle. Warren went after Warsh’s personal wealth — somewhere in the range of $130 million to $210 million — pressing him on assets he declined to detail in his financial disclosure forms. Because apparently in Elizabeth Warren’s America, being successful in the private sector before entering public service is a disqualifying offense.
(Funny how that standard never applied to John Kerry and his ketchup fortune, but whatever.)
Warsh handled it the same way he handled everything else: with the composure of a man who knows his stuff and isn’t remotely intimidated by a senator whose greatest policy achievement is yelling at bank CEOs on C-SPAN.
He told the committee that central bank independence “is essential” — in his opening remarks, not as a defense — and emphasized that Trump “never asked me to predetermine, commit, fix, or decide on any interest rate decision.” Every single allegation Warren had built her performance around? Answered in one sentence.
Meanwhile, the actual roadblock to Warsh’s confirmation has nothing to do with Warren’s theatrics. Senator Thom Tillis — a Republican — is holding up the committee vote until the DOJ wraps up its investigation into whether current Fed Chair Jerome Powell made false statements about a $2.5 billion Fed construction project. Tillis actually told Warsh he supports him, saying “Let’s get rid of this investigation, so I can support your confirmation.”
So the guy who’s supposedly a “sock puppet” impressed even the senator who’s blocking his vote. That’s how badly Warren’s narrative fell apart.
Warsh also threw in something interesting that flew under the radar: he wants the Fed to do more evaluation of artificial intelligence’s impact on the economy and favors what he called “messier meetings” — meaning real internal debate instead of the scripted, rubber-stamp sessions the Fed has been running. In other words, the guy Warren painted as a Trump yes-man is literally campaigning on MORE independence and MORE internal pushback.
Pop quiz: When was the last time Elizabeth Warren proposed anything that would make a government institution more transparent or self-critical?
We’ll wait.
The video of Warren getting outclassed is making the rounds right now, and honestly, it’s worth watching just for the “adorable” moment. She spent weeks preparing to destroy this nominee and instead gave him his best campaign footage. The look on her face when the chamber applauded Warsh’s joke — that alone was worth the price of admission.
Kevin Warsh is going to be confirmed. Warren knows it. Tillis wants his buddy Jerome Powell to be forgiven and let off the hook. Not exactly what the rest of us want but Tillis may get his way depending on how bad the President wants to oust Powell out of office. And when Warsh takes the chair, he’ll do it knowing that the best the Democrats could throw at him was a senator who once claimed to be Native American trying to call HIM a fraud.
Classic.
